Week 2 Reflection

This week’s lesson reminded me of a conversation I had with my friend about Experience Architecture (XA). She’s an undergraduate student majoring in Experience Architecture. She enjoys studying XA because it’s fun and engaging but she’s started to realize that it’s not the type of career and work she wants to do in the future. She doesn’t have to design things for people but instead she just wants to design. That got me thinking about this week’s reading and work.

In the presentation, there’s a slide about “What’s My Motivation” and key concepts. It states “for designers of consumer products or services, harnessing intrinsic motivation is critical.” So if my friend feels like she has to do it than wanting to do it (designing is what I’m referring to), does that mean that she would be a bad designer? Does that mean if she have extrinsic motivation than intrinsic will her design be based off of what she thinks/want vs the consumer/user? I write about this because I think it’s important to note where motivation comes from and like what we learned from this week, motivation is “the drive to do something.”

Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things has been an interesting read. He writes in a story-like form where understanding our surrounding is important in understanding clients and what makes good design. In Chapter three figure 3.1, is an image about the US one cent coin, the penny. American college students were given a set of drawings and asked to select the correct image of the penny. Students performed badly when identifying the penny but had no difficulty using the penny. It reminded me about Tony Faddell’s Ted Talk video on habituate. We are use to doing the same thing, in this case spending the penny, than what the penny is. We miss the important information about what makes the design of a penny important.